The implementation for Lion is very nearly complete. There are a number of things to tidy up (ProRes support, documentation, and a couple of other technical) but I think its’ ready to replace the existing 2.2.5.

I wrote in my last post that I’d detail more of the changes. Here’s a list of things that seasoned HD users might notice have changed:

• Reduction in Video and Audio codecs – Video codecs choices are reduced to H.264 and JPEG (ProRes422 will be added into the list when we can get it going). In some ways I think this is actually better. It’s simpler to operate, and there are far fewer options. The quality slider lets you set an effective bitrate for the video. Done.
• Audio Codecs – The choices here have been reduced to a set of three AAC variants (low/med/high), and one PCM variant. The default is AAC 128k 44,100hz – which I think will be just fine for most users.
• Low CPU Mode – Removed in the Lion build. It is not possible to implement this feature under Lion.
• Variable Frame Durations – This is currently forced ON. I considered it more important to get a working HD build for Lion users than to complete all the features I have been considering. It is likely that for Lion, a non-VFD mode will take the form of an automatic recompression step after the recording is completed. I am considering this because duplication of frames leads to more CPU overhead, and in Lion we’ve got plenty enough of that already (if you havn’t read my previous posts, it’s enough to say that the capture performance under Lion is noticeably worse than 10.6 – due to whatever Apple have done in their implementation – ‘read more here”:http://www.shinywhitebox.com/blog/ishowu-and-lion).

With regard to outstanding issues, we’ll be working on these (this is another way of saying ‘yeh, I know this might be broken’) over the next while:

• Sometimes the countdown timer appears in the recording. From what I can tell, when you begin capture and also try to draw full screen, Lion can lag significantly. As a result, the numbers stay on the screen way longer than they should, and thus get recorded. I’ll probably (for Lion only) reduce the size of the animation and make it appear in the top right corner of each screen only.
• ProRes – see above. It’s coming when we can get it to work.
• Variable Frame durations – see above.
• Better rate limiting – My tests on a Core2Duo resulted in seeing some choppy footage with larger recordings. I’ve got a task written up to write a better rate limiter that takes into account historic “best fps” values, and uses that as a maximum capture rate. While the top rate you might see may be less (e.g: 15fps) – it’ll be a consistent 15fps which with a moving scene will look much much better.

So, HD is up!
Please do let Rich or myself know how you find it.